The best time to give advice is to speak to a chair in front of you with nobody sitting on it. Empty chairs have arms. No ears, no minds, no conscience. Tell an empty chair anything and it will listen. And that’s precisely what I have planned to do in this column — give gyan to an empty chair. There is a vacant seat to be filled. The chair of India’s second-highest constitutional office will have a new occupant soon. The Vice President of India, as we learnt in civics books in school, chairs the Council of States. Before the monsoon recedes, we will have a new full-time presiding officer seated in the Rajya Sabha.

As a student of parliamentary democracy, let me — you guessed it — offer some suggestions to an empty chair. (Will be filled on the election of the 15th Vice President of India.)

Take ‘Notice’ of the Opposition

An important tool that enables MPs in the Opposition to hold the Union government accountable is to submit Notices seeking discussions on important issues. There has been a steep decline in the number of notices being accepted and then discussed on the floor of Parliament. In the eight years between 2009 and 2016, 110 notices were admitted into the

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